


cadere a gratia

by Nerd_of_Camelot



Category: Treasure Planet (2002)
Genre: Angst, BAMF Jim Hawkins, Coping, Cybernetics, Gen, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Jim Has Issues, Jim Hawkins Is Trying His Best, Loss of Limbs, Permanent Injury, Platonic Relationships, Post-Canon, Reunions, Space Battles, Space Pirates, Stranded
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:27:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26607487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nerd_of_Camelot/pseuds/Nerd_of_Camelot
Summary: Go back to Jim on the RLS Legacy - tell him in nine years he's going to be a fleet captain for the Navy, stranded on a remote planet in the Anadeia Cloud with a dead (or as good as) crew, and there's a band of pirates liable to find him at any time to finish the job they started; tell him things get better and then get worse - and see if he smacks you or calls you a liar.Ask Jim today if he thought any of that would ever happen, he'll tell you no, and then he'll tell you he's pretty sure it's only going to go downhill from here.But you know what they say:When the going gets tough, the tough get going.
Relationships: Amelia/Delbert Doppler, Delbert Doppler & Sarah Hawkins, Jim Hawkins & John Silver, Jim Hawkins & Original Character(s), Jim Hawkins & Sarah Hawkins
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	cadere a gratia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i always loved treasure planet and this idea randomly popped into my head like 3 weeks ago at 3am and wouldn't go away, so i decided to write it lol  
> can't say for sure when this'll update but i plan to finish writing it before the year ends so...
> 
> anyways, enjoy?

Jim would like to say, before anything else was said, that he had tried very,  _ very _ hard to do good things and be a good person. He’d spent literal years of his life fighting against the lot he’d been given. He’d helped his mother rebuild her Inn, he’d gone to the Interstellar Academy and become a fleet captain, he’d made enough money to keep his mother’s Inn in nearly perfect condition and help staff it so she wasn’t doing everything alone. He’d gone out of his way to help people who needed it. He’d picked and chosen his battles and gone against his nature to fight  _ himself _ instead of those around him and force himself to be kind.

It had been difficult, tiring work, and thankless ever-more so than it was anything else.

And now, he was 24, stranded in the Anadeia Cloud somewhere due south of Sigma Arcturus and the last planet he’d recognized was Gibrars some six hours of floating ago. His crew was all either dead or as good as, his ship had been destroyed, and the engines on his skiff had been damaged severely enough in his escape that he had no propulsion and on top of that the steering was completely done for.

The Anadeia Cloud was mostly uncharted territory ― past Gibrars, they only really knew of a few other planets and the names of all of them were unknown as the Cloud’s dangerous proximity to the Eridinas System and its central star, Edeft, prevented anyone from being willing to explore it too much. Even the most seasoned captains preferred to steer clear of Eridinas, as all of the sentient beings in the system were fiercely religious and saw sacrificing heretics to their sun as the highest, most esteemed religious action they could take. Talking them down didn’t work. The universe had lost several hundred amazing spacers trying.

With those spacers had gone most of the maps of the systems bordering Eridinas, including the Anadeia Cloud.

And Jim was, frankly,  _ really fucking fed up. _

Like, really?  _ This _ was where all of his hard work landed him?  _ This _ was what the universe gave him in exchange for him working his ass off for years trying to be a good person?

Fuck him, he guessed.

Huffing out a breath, he resumed his attempts to fix at  _ least _ the steering of his skiff. He may have absolutely no propulsion, but if he could just get the damned thing to  _ turn… _

Regrettably, he had no such luck. He didn’t have the necessary tools or anything to improvise them out of. He  _ pretty _ much had his uniform, his service pistol, and the skiff itself along with a small bag of provisions he kept tied to his hip.

He had no choice but to continue floating along with no idea when he’d reach an inhabitable planet and no way of safely landing on one regardless. Skiffs didn’t exactly have  _ landing gear, _ y’know? And even if this one did, it would have gotten blown off when those little  _ shits _ were chasing him out of the Ara Centauri, like his steering and his fucking  _ engines. _

… He was very, very tired.

Particularly of things going wrong.

… But there seemed to be a planet right within his path and if nothing else he was prepared to have to brace for a shit landing. He’d survived plenty of those. He could survive one more. No sweat.

He slid himself slowly across the skiff, to the other end, and stood. The planet in front of him seemed to be close enough the gravitational pull would draw him in, but it was far enough below him that if he didn’t manage to angle the skiff downward he would probably just end up in orbit, which wasn’t at all preferable to crashing on the planet’s actual surface.

He hummed, huffed, and then stomped once, hard, on the very end of the skiff.

It tilted dangerously forward and dipped down.

He sat back down at the back of the skiff, grabbed his wrecked steering handles, and braced himself.

The gravity of the planet caught.

He began his rocky descent.

He ducked himself down flat against the bottom of the skiff, squeezing his eyes shut, when he pierced the atmosphere and the front of the skiff, predictably, caught fire. The flames licked up past him, and he felt their heat but his quick movement had rescued him from any damage.

He crashed.

His head thumped against the bottom of the skiff.

He half-shouted a curse.

The skiff―

It continued forward.

Just skated onward.

He lifted up and dear fucking  _ lord _ he’d managed to land in a  _ lake. _

What fucking  _ luck. _

He let out a hysterical whoop and followed it up with equally hysterical laughter.

He’d managed plenty of amazing things since the whole  _ Legacy _ adventure when he was fifteen, but this just might top the charts.

He didn’t even feel bad for letting himself tuck his head between his legs and wheeze until he could breathe correctly again.

Not for the first time, he was glad that he had had Morph stay behind with his mom for this expedition, because that landing? Oh, that landing was far too rocky. Poor little blob would have been terrified and Jim honestly didn’t have what it took right now to comfort him. He needed to be focusing on fixing this skiff up well enough he could get off-planet and to the nearest spaceport to call in one of his ships ― he was a fleet captain, for Christ’s sake, even if his personal crew and vessel were down he  _ had _ to still have a ship or two out there.

Skiff bumping against the shoreline of the lake, Jim took a moment more to straighten himself out before getting up.

He didn’t imagine this planet was inhabited ― and if it was, he imagined that it was inhabited very sparsely. Life in this part of the universe was tricky to maintain… Or, intelligent life was, anyway.

Vegetation seemed to do just fine, he thought, as he looked around at the sprawling trees and grass surrounding him and thought back to the mostly green color of the planet.

Alright.

He got out of the skiff, wincing as he stepped down into mud but soldiering onward nonetheless, slogging his way through the mud onto the more solid land and taking a moment to breathe before he set off into the dense vegetation.

Finding any of the equipment or materials he needed to fix the skiff was… Unlikely. But he hadn’t taken a class about survival on other planets for nothing. He knew plenty of substitutes that would at  _ least _ manage to get him off-planet and headed back in the right direction.

Thankfully the abundance of plants on this particular planet would be incredibly helpful ― if he could find nothing else of any use, he knew how to utilize the large leaves and long strands of grass. Now, would it get him anywhere fast? No, but it would at least get him past the gravitational pull of the planet… Hopefully.

He’d burn a lot of his shit up just leaving the planet’s atmosphere and trying to hit escape velocity… And fixing skiffs while they were floating over the endless nothingness of space was a rough task. Sure, he could try, but he didn’t think the second fix would do near as well as the first.

Especially with substitutes.

But, for now, he was going to look for better supplies ― the local flora would be a last resort if he couldn’t find anything more useful. Even just some metal ore he could melt down and try to form into a tool would be better than just  _ plants. _

So he waded (there was no more appropriate word) through the foliage in search of people or supplies.

And he waded.

And he waded.

And he found little else but plants and rocks.

So, inevitably, seeing the light around him begin to dim, he cursed and turned around to head back toward the lake. The benefit of only walking forward was that he couldn’t get lost ― he only had one direction to go in to reach the lake again. And he hated that that was where his mind was. He hated that he was focusing on little things like that, because that meant he was avoiding thinking about… Something. Probably something important.

Annoyed, he groaned as he came back into the clearing with the lake and grabbed the end of his skiff. He’d seen a cave nearby, he could probably hunker down in there for the night. But he needed to get his skiff there, or at least get it out of the water.

So he dug his feet into the muddy earth and he  _ dragged. _

It was gruelling and unpleasant.

But he got the skiff to the cave, and he managed to ensure the cave was otherwise uninhabited.

After that, it was a matter of grabbing what he could to try and start a fire.

He may not need it for cooking, but he’d need it for the extra heat.

He spent the last hour of light he had before the sun went down weaving together a rudimentary door to put on the front of the cave. And then he lit a fire, pulled the one blanket he kept out of his provisions bag along with some food, and he ate and went to bed curled up in the skiff, in the cave.


End file.
